Meet the team

Corey Speers, MD, PhD

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Dr. Speers is a tenured Professor and Vice Chair of Research as well as Director of the Phase I clinical trials program in the Department of Radiation Oncology. He is also a co-director of the Breast Oncology Program at the UH Seidman Cancer Center and a Hennessy/Highland Master Clinician. Dr. Speers was previously an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center and Associate Residency Program Director in the Department of Radiation Oncology. He completed his medical and graduate degrees in the MSTP program at Baylor College of Medicine and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX before completing his residency and Holman Pathway training at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

more...

Clinically, Dr. Speers is an internationally renowned expert on the management of breast cancer, and focuses his clinical interests on the most aggressive forms of breast cancer. He has been an invited lecturer in dozens of countries including England, Scotland, Sweden, Korea, Thailand, and China as well as throughout the United States. His research interests explore the biology of aggressive breast cancers, including inflammatory and triple-negative breast cancer. His research lab has utilized kinome screens to identify novel targets for the treatment of aggressive breast cancers, including triple-negative breast cancer. The lab is also interested in the mechanisms of treatment resistance that include modulation of breast tumor initiating cells, breast cancer stem cells, and understanding novel layers of cancer biology, including the role of long non-coding RNA and the immune system in triple-negative breast cancer.

His laboratory is also interested in “bench to bedside” research that includes basic mechanistic studies, translational pre-clinical studies, and clinical research and he currently holds grants from the NIH, NCI, DOD, BCRF, Komen for the Cure Foundation, and the Hope Foundation. His interest in targeted therapies include PARP-inhibitors, CDK 4/6 inhibitors, and androgen receptor antagonists as agents for radiosensitization. These preclinical studies have been foundational to completed or open clinical trials evaluating these combinations in women with aggressive forms of breast cancer, and he is currently the PI or Co-PI on 3 international clinical trials in breast cancer. In addition, he is an internationally known expert on molecularly based biomarkers for radiation treatment decisions in breast cancer. He holds 4 patents and is co-founder of PFS Genomics (recently acquired by Exact Sciences). He helped develop the only predictive biomarker genomic signatures (POLAR and ARTIC) for breast cancer radiation efficacy.

He has won numerous clinical, teaching, and research awards from AACR, ASCO, ASTRO, and RSNA, sits on multiple cooperative group and professional society’s committees and study sections, and is an associate editor for breast cancer for the International Journal of Radiation, Biology, and Physics.

CURRENT MEMBERS

Ben Hauk

Ben graduated from the College of William & Mary with bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry and Computational & Applied Math & Statistics. He then spent two years doing prostate cancer research at the National Institutes of Health. In 2022, he joined the MD-PhD progam at Case Western Reserve and will be completing his PhD in the Speers lab.

Breanna McBean

Breanna McBean is a PhD student in the Genetics and Genomics Program at the University of Michigan and a trainee in the Genome Science Training Program. She graduated with highest distinction from California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) with a B.A. in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science in 2020. At CSUF, Breanna developed differential equations models to study biological and physical systems under the guidance of Dr. Anael Verdugo and Dr. Nicholas Brubaker, respectively. In summer research programs, she worked with Dr. Julian Jara-Ettinger (Yale University, 2018) and Dr. Fei Chen (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 2019). As a graduate student, Breanna aims to leverage multi-omics data to elucidate the role of genome regulation in triple negative breast cancer and how radiation may affect this regulation. In her free time, Breanna enjoys reading, playing board games, hanging out with her cat, Tela.

Meirola Endraws

Meirola is a graduate student in the Speers lab. She earned her B.S. in Biochemistry from Middle Tennessee State University before beginning her Ph.D. training at Case Western Reserve University. There, she joined the Speers Lab and later moved with Dr. Speers to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she is completing her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. Her research focuses on understanding mechanisms of therapy resistance in breast cancer and developing strategies to enhance treatment response.

Camila Diedrich, PhD

Camila was born in Brazil and received her PhD in Organic Chemistry from UNICENTRO in 2022. She moved to USA in 2023 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UTSW Medical Center before moving to UAB to become Speers’ Lab Manager and Animal Specialist. She has experience with analytical method validation, drug delivery systems, and different rodent models.

Sam

After graduating from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 2022, Sam went on to complete his Transitional Year Internship at Trinity Health Livonia. Sam joined the Speers Lab in 2023 as a research fellow and is excited to investigate genes regulating radiosensitization as well as the synergistic behavior between targeted therapies before matriculating into UH’s Radiation Oncology residency program in 2024.

Vesna Mercer

I am Vesna Mercer, and I am the Speers’ Lab Manager and Animal Specialist. I Graduated from the University of Toledo with my Master’s of Science in Exercise Science. I have been lab managing from the start of my career for many years. I helped establish 2 previous labs and helped publish multiple papers. I not only have laboratory animal experience but veterinary experience as well. A fun fact about me is I own a farm!